Sunday I offered the first session of the Contribution course (the Tuesday sessions begin tomorrow).

The singer’s death brought a sobering truth to the understanding of contribution: You can make your contribution and not be happy or healthy, physically, emotionally or spiritually.

When Whitney Houston was on stage and singing she was fulfilling her destiny as a contributor. She was also doing her job, earning her living and meeting her responsibilities.

Yet, Whitney wasn’t happy and she wasn’t healthy. Even when life was hell, she could get up on stage, fake it until the moments came when she was the song, she was her contribution, she was free and she was love. These moments radiated with her inner divinity and all her messy suffering disappeared.

But most of her life was she was not the song, she was the on-stage performer and the off-stage addict who could never get enough to feel whole and real and happy. She was swallowed up by her talents, her story, her neurochemistry, and very distant from her destiny.

We are grateful for her contribution. We have compassion for her life.

Whitney Houston had a talent that was very visible even as a very young child. Her talent was recognized, developed, supported and expressed fully.

When your gift is not so visible… when you do not see it and cannot name it, even though you feel it… when you fantasize how good life would be if you could just be your song… remember the dramatic polarities of Whitney Houston.

From a spiritual perspective, knowing and fulfilling your contribution is not about you and your happiness. It is about the contribution itself. Your contribution is about unselfish love. There is no agenda or attachment in you and your will to contribute, for recognition, reciprocity or reward.

Whitney sang about this in her heart-wrenching “I Will Always Love You.”

I hope life treats you kind
And I hope
you have all you’ve dreamed of
And I wish you joy
and happiness
But above all this
I wish you love

The love that is more than joy and happiness and all you have dreamed of is your contribution.

In my course on Contribution, we seek to awaken the soul clarity that allows us to develop our gift, the path that leads us to our moments of destiny when we are the living manifestation of love. If you would like to join this program, send me an email (there are currently technical difficulties in my online store)

Whitney sang about this manifestation:

“One Moment In Time”

Each day I live
I want to be
A day to give
The best of me
I’m only one
But not alone
My finest day
Is yet unknown

I broke my heart
Fought every gain
To taste the sweet
I face the pain
I rise and fall
Yet through it all
This much remains

I want one moment in time
When I’m more than I thought I could be
When all of my dreams are a heartbeat away
And the answers are all up to me
Give me one moment in time
When I’m racing with destiny
Then in that one moment of time
I will feel
I will feel eternity

I’ve lived to be
The very best
I want it all
No time for less
I’ve laid the plans
Now lay the chance
Here in my hands

Give me one moment in time
When I’m more than I thought I could be
When all of my dreams are a heartbeat away
And the answers are all up to me
Give me one moment in time
When I’m racing with destiny
Then in that one moment of time
I will feel
I will feel eternity

You’re a winner for a lifetime
If you seize that one moment in time
Make it shine

Give me one moment in time
When I’m more than I thought I could be
When all of my dreams are a heartbeat away
And the answers are all up to me
Give me one moment in time
When I’m racing with destiny
Then in that one moment of time
I will be
I will be
I will be free
I will be
I will be free

When you bring your attention to Whitney Houston feel the love she contributed to the world. Don’t dwell on the her dramas. Join the beings of the spiritual world who celebrate every moment that a human being lifts the veils of karma-bearing story and shines with freedom and love. Whitney had her moments.

If you want to engage in an intensive program on the Inner Winter mysteries of Work, Contribution and Destiny, do register for the Imagine Your Contribution course which begins in a just a couple of days – (This Sunday at noon Eastern or Tuesday, Feb 14 at 8PM Eastern.)

Work is intention, effort, activity and accomplishment.

What effort and activity goes into your thinking life? Into your feeling life? Into your life in the world? Into your relationships? Into your job? Into your evolving? Into becoming free? Into loving and being kind? (Well, I am going to stop here, but clearly there are so many more areas of being and becoming you that require work – see what comes up for you and pay attention to it.)

Here are a few questions about you and your work that will help you understand yourself and your work. Contemplate each one and write your thoughts and feelings down.

What are you

Working on?

Working through?

Working with?

Working for?

Working toward?

Working out of?

Working into?

Working around?

I am sure, with thought, you can discover answers to each of these questions and learn so much about yourself.

To bring even more insights work with these questions…

Do you experience satisfaction, pleasure, flow, and meaning in all the various ways work appears in your life?

How do you experience struggle, disappointment, heartbreak, boredom, anger in each?

And what do you learn about yourself from these observations?

Remember: don’t make dramas out of the difficulties and don’t make ideals out of the positives. These two polarities are stories and fantasies that hide reality. Your life, everyone’s life, has dramatic and ideal moments. When you put your energy and your consciousness into avoiding drama and seeking ideal, you will miss the lessons and the gifts of your real life.

Let me share some of my own reflections on my workings:

For me working on my new website is the most difficult. Teaching, counseling, speaking are joyful creativity and I truly experience flow, meaning, pleasure. But describing it all, in a way that is fixed and not fluid, is very, very challenging and a struggle.

I am working toward having a stronger will and creative joy around the fixed elements of my work. This is really about my issues with being a spiritual teacher/friend and being a self-supporting business woman. It is also about working on developing a way to effectively describe the very living, evolving and mysterious process of the Imagine Self work as a defined, clear, activity that people will want to engage with and invest their time, attention and money in.

I am working out (of) my dramas and my ideals around love and money. Yes, I have my stories and my fantasies and it is time to let go of them. They seduce me away from my productive and real work and from the rich complexity and possibilities of real relationship. The hardest and most liberating truth I must deal with in working out my love and money issues is noticing how identified and attached I am to my Oscar-winning screenplay!

Change Your Relationship to Work

The work of writing this post has brought new light and new grounding to my own imagination of work. I feel more awake and more empowered now.

How do you feel having read this? Will you work on the questions? Leave your comments please – They are a gift to others.

Wouldn’t you love to arrive at the spring Equinox – your Inner Spring – with a new relationship to work and a clearer sense of your ability to fulfill your destiny and make your contribution to the world and the future?

If you want to engage in an intensive program on the Inner Winter mysteries of Work, Contribution and Destiny, do register for the Imagine Your Contribution course which begins in a just a couple of days – (This Sunday at noon Eastern or Tuesday at 8PM Eastern.)

Learn more here.

Bones, our glorious 206 bones, allow us to stand tall and make effective and productive gestures. They contain marrow, the source of our blood. Bones give us vitality, strength and presence.

Skin, our largest organ, contains all that we are with resilence and tenderness. It breathes our being. It sweats and purifies. It never hides. Skin, calloused or soft, protects our form. Amazing.

When you speak from your bones and your skin you have a sense of yourself that allows you to speak your truth with calm certainty. You know where you stand and you know your boundaries. As I said very powerful!

Those of us who suffered trauma lost our sense of our bones and our skin. We lost our ability to stand for our rights, for our integrity, for our individuality. We lost our boundaries and the sense that there is a sacred wholeness to our existence and a sacred pace in which we dwell.

Without our bones and our skin, our ability to recognize, declare and fulfill our unique contribution is challenged. We may chose to be safe, rather than true. We defend, rather than declare. We dream, rather than develop.

I encourage you to pay creative, healing attention to your bones and your skin.

Let me share my personal bones story: I found my bones, the skeleton of my own being, about 7 years ago. It was transformative, healing and liberating. I felt my structure and my powerful uprightness. I now live in my bones and speak from their vital marrow! As my bone consciousness and bone self matures, my attention is now on my pelvis which supports the organs and activities of digestion and reproduction.

The part of my soul that dwells in my pelvis is my will. Through my will I make my contribution to the world and the future.

Dreams form in my skull.
Desires breathe in my ribcage.
Deeds birth in my pelvis.

If you have never paid attention to YOUR bones, begin now. Think of something you long to do. Imagine it just with your skull, then your ribs, and finally your pelvis. What is the difference? If you have trouble with imagining the force of your pelvis, google an image of a pelvis, so you can see it. It is massive. Then feel your creative energy drop into your own pelvis and speak about your contribution. This is a spiritual exercise of self-consciousness. Keep practicing – it will make a big difference in how you nourish and birth your contribution.

I invite you to experience more about the mysteries of Contribution. Here is the description of the course which begins in a few days. Click here.

Life is no “brief candle” to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. George Bernard Shaw

What are the conditions needed for your soul to manifest your individual contribution, your generosity of spirit, the gift of your lifetime, your light for the future?

I am sitting here, puzzled. I don’t know where these conditions are understood or taught. They are fundamental to being human and becoming I and I would think that sometime around 15 or 16, we should have a class on the conditions for showing up in the world with our unique and cosmically necessary gift.

“Human generosity is possible only because at the center of the solar system a magnificent stellar generosity pours forth free energy day and night without stop and without complaint and without the slightest hesitation . . . each of us joins (a) cosmological lineage when we accept the Sun’s gift of energy and transform it into creative action that will enable the community to flourish.” Brian Swimme

I remember taking an aptitude test when I was 17. It was going to tell me what I was interested in and had a talent for. My scores were high across the board. I could do anything according to the test. What a curse! It meant that whenever I got bored or met a challenge, I could go do something else. The inner conditions of commitment and perseverance dried up, suffocated, froze and hidden in the dark cave of missing of selfhood.

According to the values measured by the aptitude test, I had no internal conditions naturally limiting me, narrowing my choices, pointing me in a direction, illuminating a particular goal. I was full of extraordinary potential, completely undefined.

And everyone thought that was wonderful. No one had the wisdom to see and help me deal with the dilemmas I was going to face.

Of course, your experience might have been just the opposite – restrictive limitations and rigid definition. Leaving you with little or no sense of creative freedom.

What were your limitations, your given choices, your given directions, your particular goals? Did you feel capable, able to fly to your stars? Or were you swimming on the edge of a whirlpool of possibilities?

One inner condition that needs to be awakened is the confidence that in our greatest weakness we may find the hidden purpose of our lives. We need to have a self-love that encourages us to open our inner shame to the light of creative possibility. We need to know that what appears to hold us back may actually be leading us forward. I am pointing to learning that our great truths are often revealed in paradox.

What are the paradoxes in your inner conditions?

Then beyond inner conditions, there are the outer conditions. A seed needs outer conditions of right measures of water, oxygen, temperature and light to germinate, to break out of the seed coat, to root and shoot.

What do human beings need? What outer conditions do you need?

Here a a few outer conditions I wish I had had…

A wise and compassionate questioner who understands forgiveness and knows how to celebrate.

A few noble models intimately close who show how to name and overcome inner and outer demons and obstacles.

Someone at my back whispering to me of freedom.
Someone at my side sharing my journey, laughing with me and sometimes at me.
Someone way out in front of me calling my true name.
Someone with a big foot to kick me in the behind – often.

A schooling that awakened a practical consciousness of contribution.
A training for my will.

And education, support and skills for the practical aspects of my contribution.

For human beings to germinate the essential outer conditions are mysterious and amazing.

What outer conditions are you looking for? Please don’t mention winning the lottery – everyone wishes for that.

In spite of and because of…

I can go back over my life and see all the struggles, all the lack of satisfaction, all the feelings of being attacked or abandonned by inner and outer conditions, and see the essential hairpin turns of my journey to my full self-expression, the grand, surprising fulfillment of my destiny. I am here doing work that is such a right-on-the-mark expression of who I am.

You will get there. You just need to know where to look and how to recognize what you see.

Listen to your inner observer. Let your inner friend hold you warmly. And follow your inner guide. They, your three higher selves, will help you grasp the right conditions, take a leap forward, sing your heart out to the world.

And it is never too late or too soon. Age is a condition that may be just right!

Please post a comment sharing with me and others your sense of the inner and outer conditions need for your self-fulfillment. Ask questions. Let us know what inspires you to keep seeking your Selfhood.

I also offer the compelling, empowering Inner Winter Intensive

Imagine Your Contribution & Fulfill Your Destiny

a fundamental schooling in manifesting your purpose

Learn about the benefits, the content, the dates & times, the cost here.

I will continue to write posts throughout Inner Winter focusing on the question of your destiny and your work in the world.

The Immaculate Conception is the Catholic doctrine(teaching) that Mary was conceived without original sin and incapable of personal sin.

This teaching is important to Catholics. Should it be important to all human beings? Should it be important to you?

As a mood,
as a question,
as a quality,
as a way of knowing yourself,
yes, it is important for each of us.

As a belief or a doctrine, probably not.

As an imagination that leads us to finding, knowing and becoming self? Oh, my, yes.
Let these questions inspire you today.

Just imagine the idea of sin! What is sin? What are your thoughts about sin? Your feelings? About original sin, universal and born in and by everyone – casting us out of Paradise, and the intimate personal sins commited and carried by the individual – casting one into Hell?

Just imagine immaculate conception? Would being immaculately conceived mean never knowing guilt, shame, blame? Could we be self-aware or self-developing, without the shadowy contours of sin and the desire to be sinless?
Pretending & Hiding

For 2011 my thoughts on immaculate conception are about pretending and hiding. All little children love games of pretending and hiding. With pretending we want to be seen as something we are not. With hiding we want to disappear, to not be seen. Do you remember the fun of both when you were a child?

These innocent games for the child become limiting defenses for the adult who feels like one who was born within sin and commits sins of offense, harm, neglect, denial, hubris and so on the endless list of transgressions.

When do you pretend?

When do you hide?

Can you seek a new conception of yourself?

Today, do you dare to find within your soul, the immaculately conceived mother/womb of your incarnate “I Am?” This is the mother/womb that holds all of you, the sinless innocent and sinning seeker of wisdom.

Celebrate the love that tells you that you never need to pretend to be not-yourself or hide what is yourself.

My posts combine providing (insights, inspirations, and new perspectives) with promoting (my programs, products and personal guidance). The first are at no cost, the latter have fees. Both offer value to the degree you invest your time and attention.

Part of my growing edge and what I love about my work is waiting for my inspirations – the topics for a post that link the providing with the promoting.

In the middle of last night I woke up with today’s topic – Leftovers.

I find behind all cultural and personal habits and patterns of living a spiritual connection, metaphor or lesson. The mundane reveals the meaningful.

Let’s go behind and beyond the sensory delight of leftovers.

To my international subscribers: Thanksgiving leftovers are part of the American culture. I think you will get a sense of their meaning in what I write.

Although many meals provide leftovers, only Thanksgiving has enobled uneaten food to a grand tradition and memory-laden ritual. What was served warm from the oven is now served cold from the refrigerator or steaming from the microwave. I love Thanksgiving leftovers. Why?

I love knowing when I have a great meal, I can have more the next day and that often, the next day the flavors are richer and more satisfying, but no ordinary snack or meal of leftovers matches the qualities of Thanksgiving leftovers. Thanksgiving leftovers have a hidden ingredient. They are flavored and warmed with memories of feelings. The abundance of heart that lives in a yearly meal that celebrates with gratitude the interdependence among family, friends, the earth and the spirit makes the Thanksgiving leftovers so extra special yummy.

Leftovers in the Soul

In the course of my day, my week, or my year I am living and responding to life. I engage in events and encounters. I am a participant. I am eating the meal the day it is prepared and served.

The “leftover” experience moves me from participant to recollector and reveiwer. I get to bring the events and encounters together and look at and taste them all over again from a new and deeper perspective.

When your soul hungers for another experience of meaning that has mellowed into truth, a feeling that now reflects an incandescent beauty or a deed that thunders with goodness, go to the cupboard of your soul where the leftovers are remembered and have a feast of self-awareness.

And forgive me for a balancing perspective. Sometimes a thought, a feeling or a deed that was so delicious when first experienced has gotten moldy, soured, or turned bad. That’s a sign that it’s time to purge the memory cupboad

If you want a guide to enjoying or purging the leftovers in the cupboard of your soul, do register for the Inner Advent program.

Sign up for Inner Advent now.
The Leftover Ritual of the Inner Year

Like Thanksgiving, Inner Advent is the leftover ritual of our inner year. By the time we get this close to the solstice, our soul, like the refrigerator at the end of Thanksgiving, is full of events and encounters waiting to be remembered for their inner significance.

Over four weeks, the leftover weeks of the Inner Year, spend time reflecting on the year that is ending and prepare for the year that will soon be beginning.

Give thanks for your inner year, celebrate Inner Advent. It is a wonderful preparation for Inner Christmas. We look back, so we can look forward. We see who we have been, so we can open to who we are becoming.

Sign up for Inner Advent now.

Each year you evolve. You become something you weren’t last year.

Some of your evolution is intentional and some is unintentional. But if you don’t take time to review your year as the unfolding of a new you, how do you know yourself? How do you know what you mean when you say I am?

How do you SEE yourself?
How do you CELEBRATE yourself?
How do you MAKE WISE CHOICES about the coming year?

Are you PREPARED TO BECOME new, different, more mature, more self-compassionate, more creative in the coming year?

INNER ADVENT is a program that guides you in saying goodbye to the old year. It provides an organized approach to looking at your inner evolvution and understanding the meaning of your year with creative compassion.  It cleans up your soul and prepares your inner life for becoming new, for a another year of evolving. It creates a sweet emptiness, a manger in your soul.

It will take time to realize the meaning of your year.  The webinar is 60-90 minutes each week. Your selfwork of journalling, creating your Inner Advent mandala (not a work of art but a self-illuminating artistic representation of your year – no critiquing, just wondrous and courageous self-expression) will take your attention and your effort – 2-10 hours over the four weeks. Optional partnering calls could be another 30-60 minutes each week.

Is your Inner Advent worth this much of your precious time? Will you be happier? More peaceful? More grounded? More alive? More awake to your self? Yes, yes, yes!

Will you find more true freedom to be and become yourself? Yes.

Will you find more love?  For yourself? for others (even the difficult others)? for the world? for the future? for the past? for the moment? Yes.

Inner Advent, like all the Imagine Self, Inner Year and Inner Life programs, is a serious, profound and mysterious spiritual practice. It also offers moments of true joy when the experience of your evolving I AM sings in harmony with the evolving Cosmos.

Inner Advent is part of a spiritual curriculum for finding, knowing and becoming yourself.

How do you find yourself in all the events and circumstances of the year?

How do you recognize yourself with confidence and authority? What was authentically YOU in your thoughts, feelings and deeds?  

How did you evolve, become new, more mature? What new truth lived in your thoughts? What new beauty formed in your feelings? How did goodness pour out from your actions? What happened to your soul over the year?

The cosmic rhythm of your inner year wakes up to these questions and finds their answers during the last few weeks before the Solstice and the Nativity – your soul’s Inner Advent.

This stove was over 20 years old and I had been living with it for less than two months. Now useless junk, I watched it being wheeled out through the backdoor.

Suddenly, I began to think/feel about all the people, all the human souls, that had been connected to the stove:

• All the people who worked for the manufacturer who made it, the appliance dealer who sold it to the building contractor and the guy that installed it. How many individuals had been involved in bringing the stove into the house it was now leaving?
• All the people whose bodies had been nourished by the food cooked on the stove. I have no idea how many people have lived in this house but over 20 years as many as 20,000 meals could have been prepared using the stove.

I did not know any of these individuals personally, but we had a connection through this metal object.

Rudolf Steiner said we must materialize spirit and spiritualize matter. I share this wisdom often in my writing and teaching. How often do I apply it in my life?

But these thoughts about the old stove, put this wisdom into practice and it felt very good to my soul. I wasn’t being sentimental: I was being morally awake.  I was recollecting the human meaning, purpose and significance, and honoring the numerous human connections living in an old appliance. I was spiritualizing matter.

It took me less 20 seconds to think the thoughts and feel the feelings. but I have spent a number of minutes sharing the experience with others and now I am taking about 30 minutes to write this post.  About 3000 people will read this post and some will be inspired to think spiritually and morally about the mundane things in their lives.

Yes, the stove is now on a waste pile somewhere along with thousands of other discarded, useless objects. It is part of the ecological challenge of waste. But energetically something spiritually dynamic is living in my consciousness and now in yours.  The stove that was used to feed bodies, fed my soul with insight and my heart with awe for all the human initiative and connection that came together around this appliance over its “usetime.”

You might want to make it a spiritual practice whenever you throw something out to momentarily bring your attention to its relationship to the engagement of so many human souls, the thoughts, feelings, and initiatives, surrounding its existence. 

What also happened in those few seconds of honoring the old stove and its role in the human community, was the preparation for the new stove.

We took a few minutes and some focused energy to clean the stove space (twenty years of other people’s spills and ant traps, etc.) The new stove was installed into a place that was clean and prepared.

Always have a thoughtful moment when you say goodbye. Always put some thought into preparing for the new.

Reminder: We are approaching Inner Advent when you bring your inner attention to saying goodbye to your old year and preparing for the new. To learn about Inner Advent click here.

Are they for real? Do they matter?

Until I was in my early forties, spiritual beings didn’t really matter to me.  I certainly had beliefs about their existence – Sunday-school-meets-New-Age beliefs, but I had no understanding and no active relationship to spiritual beings. I thought they were probably real, but I didn’t think they really mattered to me.

Actually, I hadn’t given it much thought because I had never been introduced to the reality and the significance of spiritual beings. I didn’t know what they did and how they related to my life. I had no concept for spiritual beings. No context for understanding why and how they mattered. My immature and vague beliefs were reassuring when I felt existential dread, but they were more a cloak I wrapped around myself to keep off the chill, then a ground for being.

And I did not feel any companionship with them, although I am a spiritual being. Human beings are spiritual beings. And there is what I called God, the all-encompassing name for the undefinable divine. In between, above, below, behind, what was there to connect with, to engage with? Were there other, more distinct forms of spiritual being, with purpose, task, even personality, that I could interact with?

And what does that interaction look like, feel like, develop into? How do I converse with spiritual beings? How do they converse with me?

Finally another question for serious consideration: If there are spiritual beings, am I real for them? Do I matter to spiritual beings?

Over twenty years of studying Rudolf Steiner’s cosmology gave me a conceptual framework for understanding spiritual beings, made them real and showed me how they mattered. But it wasn’t until I was called to teach and guide the Inner Year programs that I found a way to experience and encourage a warm intimacy, an engaged companionship between the human being, you and me, and the myriad beings of spirit.

I do love the benefits of the cyclical focus of the Inner Year.  Each year at this time, when the cosmos resonates with the love of spiritual beings, I find more engagement, full of creativity, surprises, comfort, challenge, and real delight. There is a relaxed wakefulness in the engagement.  Real companionship has grown.

Spiritual beings do not all look alike, sound alike or feel alike.  I can make distinctions and discern subtleties now. My life is blessed with a conscious attention to the unique qualities of both the spiritual beings and my relationships with them. 

I am not special in this capacity.  Each of us is part of this spiritual company, this amazing fellowship. We just need to give it attention and slowly we can cultivate, nurture, and mature our awareness of our constant companionship with all our fellow spiritual beings from the grand Seraphim, to the nature spirits dwelling in the tree outside our windows, to our guardian angels, and to the beings that we knew as our grandfathers and grandmothers during their earthly lives.

In four webinars, beginning this Sunday, I will share with you what I have learned about Spiritual Beings and how to engage their companionship. You can participate during the live calls, or wait and download the audios to listen to as you take a long walk on a refreshing fall day.  To learn more about the course, click here.

This morning I received two blessings both connected to the Lifting the Veils course. The first shows the importance of sharing your story to find yourself and help others and the second pointed out the painful vulnerability of doing this deeply intimate group work using technology.

The First Blessing  – Inspiring

 I receive the emails from Karma Tube. Today offered this very tender, achingly moving video of a gifted teacher guiding his 10 year old students into the fullness of life through the experience of empathy. More than anything I have written about the importance of biography work, this short video reveals how one person’s story frees the secrets held in the silently suffering heart of another.  I could write much more but nothing would match the beauty of this little video.

If this video, ignites a desire to do the work of Lifting the Veils, first read the second blessing and then register for the course.

Video from KarmaTube

The Second Blessing – Sobering

This morning a participant in the last Lifting the Veils course wrote me an email filled with disappointment and anger. In one session she had been sharing a story with deep feelings and her skype connection failed. The following session I did not begin with returning to her story as the focus was on another critical experience of early childhood. This person wrote that she felt painfully discounted.

Let me address her experience, because it points out two the the “dangers” of this work.

The Context Danger: The context of the Lifting the Veils program, as in all the programs I offer, is educational, not therapeutic. The outcome is self-knowledge and self-empowerment arising out of self-compassion and inner freedom.  The basis of the education is the archetypes of being human and becoming I, the universal components and development of the human being, and the unique configurations and complexity of individual experience.

Through understanding the archetypal, the individual can be illuminated.  Suddenly, personal experience and the challenging patterns, limiting defenses, and dysfunctional perspectives you formed in order to survive find their right relationship to your destiny and the redemptive and restorative purposes and lessons of your life fall into place. Self-knowledge, self-compassion and inner freedom increase.

This is group work greatly enriched by the sharing of personal story and personal questions. This sharing is intimate and sacred. Empathy and shared feelings leading to the wisdom of objective compassion is encourgaed. The distraction of sentimentalizing and dramatizing the often painful experiences of another is discouraged.

My job as facilitator and educator is a tough one. I must stay true to the course and the group, and that means in rare cases an individual can feel discounted, disregarded, neglected and not valued.  In these cases, I am always willing to offer a private conversation at no cost to address these sensitive feelings with the attention and compassion they deserve.

No one should take a program I offer with the goal of getting fixed or fulfilling a fantasy of finding the ideal embrace of attention and love. I developed these programs as a curriculum for “finding yourself, knowing yourself, becoming yourself.” Each program comforts and challenges, soothes and stimulates, answers questions and asks questions, and strives to guide you to the inner means of resolving karma and fulfilling destiny. All of the programs require courage and vulnerability and an ability to stand in your own fire. I am here to serve your I-consciousness, not your story, and  I intend to serve with objective compassion and growing wisdom.

The Technology Danger:  Skype can be iffy as signals can be weak, there can be a reverb/echo, your connection can be dropped and some participants have difficulty in following the steps to create a connection that allows for interactivity.  It is possible to be on the “call” via your phone which may incur long distance charges.

All my Inner Year and Inner Life sessions are recorded and can be downloaded, a true benefit of technology. And I provide valuable handouts. Every participant receives a link to the recording. This means that even if you need to miss a session or you experience tech difficulties, you can still experience the content and the sharing of others.  For all the intensive programs, I set up everyone with a partner for weekly calls where the course work is supported and enriched by thoughtful and warm conversations.

The technology is a risk, but it also makes the work possible on a global scale – forming intimate community in spite of physical distances.  One participant in the upcoming Lifting the Veils is from Norway.

Here is the description of the course where you will find the link to register.

http://theinneryear.blogspot.com/2011/10/lifting-veils-veils-from-birth-to-seven.html